Steve Jobs, RIP

His one deed that affects me personally: he brought a full UNIX onto the laptop, and it just works. A full UNIX with the power of the command line, if needed; and with a well-integrated GUI. Even the MacOS X of 2001 was far ahead of today’s Linux in this aspect.

And this was Steve Jobs’ doing.

It’s astonishing to look back on Openstep and to realize, how far ahead it was of today’s monster toolkits. Yes, Steve Jobs didn’t invent Objective-C, NEXTSTEP, or InterfaceBuilder. But he made them happen; without him, there wouldn’t be any Cocoa or UIKit. People would still be stuck with layers of crutches upon layers of crutches upon Xlib. Or some Win32 shit.

So, thanks, Steve Jobs. Requiescat in pace.

About Daniel Tiggemann

Software-developer living in Cologne, Germany. Was once a physicist, specialized in computer simulations and parallel programming. Now more into JavaScript, web frontend development, and especially mobile computing.